Wikibooks:Busywork

This page is a Wikibooks essay, not an official policy or guideline. Essays in the project namespace represent significant viewpoints, and anyone can participate in improving them. An essay in userspace need only represent that user's stance on the topic.

Busywork is the work that is done here at Wikibooks that doesn't produce book content, and that doesn't directly help the community towards its goals. Some people enjoy keeping active working on things such as aesthetics or organization here at Wikibooks, but Wikibookians should not be forced to perform repetitive or boring tasks in the interest of aesthetics or organization. Some basic guidelines to follow are:

Don't make unreasonable demands concerning the content of certain pages, the actions of other contributors, or the methods in which tasks get done.

Discussion and talk archives, when needed, should be kept simple. Archiving a discussion should be a quick and easy task. Not all discussions need to be manually archived, remember: the entire edit summary of every page is already recorded, and old discussions can always be found in the history pages.

Do not require the use of lots of fancy templates or boilerplate markup on discussions, archives, etc. If such markup is used to beautify a discussion that's okay, but it is not required for anybody to do so.

Avoid relying on bots that perform complicated tasks on a regular basis. When such a bot fails, it will be left to human contributors to complete those tasks. Avoid complex tasks in general.

Remember, Wikibookians typically like to write book content, and if you force them to do all sorts of busywork, no books will ever be written.